Category: Vegetable Sides
-
We are in the final days of our vacation, when things get sort of panicky and weird. The temperature has dropped and it's now colder here than in Berlin, which is no good at all. I'm wearing a very strange mish-mash of clothing (palm-frond leggings! a stained t-shirt! my mother's cardigan! white Birks!) from the…
-
Thrilling the hearts of American immigrants all over Berlin, lacinato kale (also known as Tuscan kale or dinosaur kale) has recently been spotted in grocery stores throughout the city. According to my unscientific polling, we Yankees are also single-handedly responsible for it no longer being available, because we buy up every single bundle of it…
-
Have you noticed how many good cookbooks are out this year? It feels like a bumper crop, an absolute bounty of fascinating, good-looking, delicious books, and I can't get enough. I have a backlog of cookbooks I have been itching to tell you about and thought about bundling them all into one post, but that…
-
A little update on the state of affairs over here: I am sick, felled by the flu. Hugo is in the full throes of cranky, screamy toddlerhood (so soon? help!). It is my birthday, but because of the aforementioned germs I had to cancel every fun thing I had planned for the day. And I…
-
Last week something terribly exciting happened: I found fresh spinach at my local green market. That never happens. Yep, Berlin may have many wonderful things now, but fresh spinach at the market still counts as a rarity. (You can sometimes find it at Turkish grocery stores.) (Proof? My mother-in-law, a fabulous cook and curious human…
-
This post's alternate title should be A Cautionary Tale About Avoiding Butter. What happened was I read about cabbage strudel (did ever those two words have better partners?) almost four years ago and dutifully clipped the recipe (actually, by then I think I bookmarked it) and then schlepped that bookmark around with me from New…
-
Sometimes I say to myself, I say, Luisa, does the world really need another recipe for and then I fill in the blank with whatever thing I'm about to tell you about, cookies or soup or roasted vegetables, say. And then I hem and I haw with myself for a good while, feeling alternatingly dejected…
-
My aunt Laura, my mother's sister, was with us for most of our holiday in Italy. This was a good thing for several reasons, not the least of which was the guarantee of good meals every single day. I don't say this to knock my mother, mind you. She, too, freely admits that with Laura…
-
It's a holiday here again, one of a few this month that gives us a nice, stretched-out weekend and a Monday that is eerily quiet. Max left early this morning to get some work done back in Kassel. When the front door closed behind him, the baby started crying and then I almost cried at…
-
It was one of those days. You know, where everything is just a little off? The kind of day where you wake up tired and never seem able to catch up. Where you find yourself clock-watching until bedtime. I hate those days. Feeling exhausted and impatient, then feeling guilty about feeling exhausted and impatient, and…